It is a well known teaching practice to reinforce verbally or visually provided information by having the student copy the information onto a piece of paper or a blackboard. For example, a geography teacher may show a student a map and then have the student draw a copy of the map. This forces the student to concentrate on the subject and also to compare his or her own hand drawn map to the originally displayed map. In this manner, the student uses a number of different mental processes to fully learn the information being taught.
One device commonly used in conjunction with this teaching method is tracing paper. The student places the tracing paper over the original and makes a copy of it on the top surface of the tracing paper using a suitable writing utensil.
There have been a number of patented inventions that can also be used in conjunction with this teaching method.
Schmidt (U.S. Pat. No. 3,492,743) teaches an apparatus in which a plurality of opaque data sheets are used in combination with a single translucent sheet. Each of the data sheets shows a certain type of figure. The student traces the figure from each data sheet onto the translucent sheet and thereby forms a cumulative final picture in which all the figures shown on all the data sheets are combined.
Thomas (U.S. Pat. No. 3,768,177) shows a device in which a background sheet is placed onto a holding surface. A number of cut-out units are then placed onto the background sheet to form a combined pattern. A transparent sheet can be placed onto the formed pattern and additional patterns can be drawn onto the transparent sheet and thereby be in effect added to the background pattern.
While many devices in the prior art employ the use of a single transparent sheet, none allow the student to make and combine multiple transparent sheets. The use of multiple transparent sheets as a teaching aid is a well known concept often seen in the bound volumes of encyclopedias. For example, the human anatomy section of an encyclopedia may include a plurality of transparent sheets with different aspects of the human body shown on each sheet. The student can view them singly or in combined fashion to learn the relative positions of the different detailed portions of the anatomy.
However, the above noted use of bound transparencies does not lend itself to variations of the information presented. The transparent sheets cannot be removed, redrawn or reordered. In addition, a blank transparent sheet or similar structure is not provided to allow the student to trace the depicted information. If the teacher wished to provide unbound copies of the transparent sheets, expensive and often unavailable equipment would be required to copy the patterned transparent sheets onto blank transparent sheets.
The prior art does not provide any means whereby a student can effectively form his or her own teaching device. The student is limited to a rote tracing of subject matter without the ability to combine tracings and thereby to develop a new pattern. In addition, there is no apparatus available that enables the student to stack the tracings in a different order and thereby teach a related concept or the inter-relationships between different patterns.